As I grab my pad and pen and begin to talk from within,
Oh God, my eyes they water like a preacher who’s sinned,
I’m only human, but…
The world has put me on a platform,
Since the day I was born,
To only wait for my downfall…

DREAM’S END

By Ryan Krupienski

I wonder how many people have died in the name of my dream?

Kevin.

John.

Douglas.

Warlock.

Illyana.

Kwannon.

Japheth.

Joseph.

David.

Sarah.

Everett.

Monet.

Paige.

Jonothon.

Clarice.

Logan.

Alyssa.

My God. I should have stopped them. Each and every one of those deaths, I should – I could – have prevented. I could have tried harder… done something more. In some cases I wasn’t even here, but I should have been. I barely even knew some of them. Including David… my own son. I barely knew my own son.

For too long, all of you have bared the burden of my dream. You all have suffered, faced death, lost loved ones, experienced things that no human being should ever have to experience in their life. Yes, I’ve heard the arguements before; you all know the risks, you all made the choice to live this life. You’ve all told me time and again that it’s not my fault. And I always tried my hardest to believe you.

The fact, though, is that it is my fault. No matter what way you try to spin it, I am to blame for these lives being cut short. They all died because of me… because of my dream. Knowing me, knowing the X-Men, being a part of this life… it’s a death sentence. It truly is.

Illyana. My God, she was just a child. Her blood is on my hands. I wasn’t smart enough to cure the Legacy Virus. Though if I had never formed the X-Men in the first place, the insane future the virus came from would never have been. Imagine how much pain and suffering would have been abated?

Of course, I was the one to beat it. I was the one to survive the Legacy Virus. I’ve cheated death a hundred times over, but these men and women who devoted their lives to my vision of peace… they were not so lucky. So many lives cut short, so much potential wasted. And no one to blame but myself.

Emma. Dear God, another horrible error in judgement, one that I never bothered to inform any of you about. I know what’s happened… I know what she did. She went insane. Why? Because of me, of course. I tried to change her… I tried to subdue the evil within her, I tried to destroy it. In the end, she only came back with a vengeance, and she murdered children. Children that I left in her care.

How could I? This past year I’ve been gone, hiding from you all… how could I have pulled myself together, come to find some semblence of peace, with so much sin to atone for? Being in Genosha with Erik, I grappled with my guilt and my shame, but then bottled it away, making excuses for myself and convincing myself that the world needed me. Patting myself on the back, replaying in my mind every consolation ever offered to me by all of you. I used those tactics to ‘move on’.

Yet while I’m ‘moving on’, I’ve just left my would-be children in shambles. I left you all by yourselves to pick up the pieces. Scott and Jean… I destroyed you both. I know that. And I will never forgive myself. Instead of taking away the pain of losing a child, I only doubled it.

You may be thinking that I’m being too hard on myself here, and perhaps if any of you were here with me as I write this, you’d tell me that I can’t change the past. I can’t undo my mistakes, that I need to accept that and stop beating myself up.

We’re all human. We all make mistakes. But what do you do when you can’t seem to stop making those mistakes? What do you do when those mistakes are constantly costing people their lives?

I hate myself for that. I hate that so many people have died because of me, and I hate that I’ve wasted so much time being a fool. My dream… peace between human and mutant. I still believe in it, even to this day, but what a fool I was. I never had the courage to take the steps truly necessary to make a difference… I held us back, in a never-ending cycle of fighting to protect the world, only to have it still fear and hate us at the end of the day. I know you all have had your doubts at certain times in the past, but more often than not I was always there, convincing you that things were getting better, when indeed they were in many ways getting worse.

Cassandra has hurt you all so badly, she has caused so much damage… yet in the short time she was here at the institute, she managed to make more progress with my dream than I did in the more than ten years I had to commandeer it. That is an undeniable fact. Could you ever imagine a mutant publicly announcing a run for senator and being met with support? I dreamt of it, most certainly, but now it’s more than that. It’s a reality.

I cannot say that I hate my sister. I hate everything she’s done – manipulating you all, controlling your minds, using you as her puppets. And Logan… shekilled Logan. So many atrocious things she’s done, but the end result is her being seen as a sort of hero to the world. She couldn’t have planned any of this better.

I can’t say I hate Cassandra, though, because I barely know her. I know tiny fractions of information she told me about her life. I know how she was used and abused by our father. I used to love my father… I used to think so highly of him. I will die wondering why he did the things that he did.

And I will die wishing I could have stopped Cassandra before she did everything she’s done. I know my sister is essentially dead already, there is no hope I will ever be able to speak to her… to try and understand. Would that I could, though? Would I want to try and get closer to such a monster, to someone who’s hurt the people I claim to care so much about?

As I did with Magnus?

The cell is small, but it’s not dark or filthy in the least. Erik Magnus Lehnsherr has been treated well during his time in the custody of the United Nations, and he must admit it’s been a humbling experience. He was very much expecting for his captors – his human captors – to treat him like an animal, much like the Nazis treated him and his family during World War II. To him it serves as another example that perhaps he hasn’t been giving the human race the credit it deserves.

He wears a plain white uniform that leaves only his hands and his head exposed, and sits on a soft mattress that’s lined with a plastic frame. Erik has to laugh at the plastic furnishings of his cell; all he would need to escape is one live body full of blood – full of iron – and there are certainly plenty of those around him everyday. The interrogators, the guards outside his cell… he’s truly surprised the UN hasn’t employed a power dampener.

He sits quietly on the bed, flipping through the latest newspaper from London. He’s fascinated to learn what’s been going on while he’s been detained – the explanations for the Genosha incident given by the X-Men and Avengers, the recovery efforts in Los Angeles being led by his daughter Wanda, the announcement of ‘Professor’ Cassandra Xavier having fallen ill. He’s impressed, the heroes have handled this situation better than he would have expected.

As Erik’s eyes continue to follow the printed words of one of the articles, the door to his cell slides open, and in walks a caucasian woman with short, spikey blonde hair. She smiles as Erik looks up to her.

“Miss Huxley,” he acknowledges.

“Hello, Erik,” the woman replies.

“Isn’t it a bit early in the morning for you to be visiting me?”

“Isn’t it a bit early to be up reading the news?”

Erik puts the paper down and stands to face Huxley. “More questions? More tests? What do you want now?”

“Oh, there will always be more questions, trust me on that one,” Huxley quips. “With a track record as muddled and crazy as yours, most definitely.”

“Well I doubt this is a social call. What can I help you with?” Erik asks her again.

“Running a country, if you’re interested.” Erik shows he is, as he cocks an eyebrow in response to the comment.

“I’m listening…”

My thoughts are so jumbled. It’s becoming harder and harder to think coherently. Ever since our final confrontation with Cassandra, I’ve felt a change washing over me. Perhaps it’s what brought all this guilt back to the surface? Finally seeing for myself everything my sister has done, in turn forcing me to face what I’ve done? I can’t be certain, nor can I say that there aren’t other forces at play here.

I do not want to do this. I don’t want to leave you all… again. But I must. I can’t afford to stay here and possibly ruin, or take, yet another life. I also cannot hide here forever; if I were to stay, it would only be a matter of time before I was discovered, before someone found out the truth about Cassandra and myself, and exposed it to the world. Things are going so well as far as relations between humans and mutants right now, I will not dare jeopardize that.

You have all done so much to make me proud, and in turn I have done so much to let all of you down. I am aware of the good I have done, the good you would all remind me of, but none of it excuses my crimes. The lives that have been lost under my watch… Onslaught… taking a child away from his parents… Emma’s rampage…

God forgive me… I coveted you, Jean, when you were a child.

If there is one last lesson I wish to teach all of you, it is this – dreams are for those who sleep. We all have our fantasies, our ideas of how the world should work, but we will not make a difference simply by believing in those ideas. To truly make a difference requires action, and the sort of action necessary requires stepping into new territory, venturing into the uncertain. Stagnation is certain doom.

Please do not cry for me, for my leaving you again. Please do not waste your thoughts on me. I hid from you all for so long, and you already spent so much time looking for me. I am not worth any of your efforts, not anymore. Please accept that I am gone, and will not be returning. You all have already proven you are more than capable of living this life without me being there to guide you.

Cassandra is still here, my children, and she was right when she told me this – the world truly is not big enough for the both of us.

I love you all.

~Charles

“So if I’m to understand you correctly… the United Nations has drafted a constitution for Genosha that is to be implemented immediately, is looking to establish a full-fledged government, and you’d like me to serve as president?”

Huxley grins as Erik finishes his sentence. “Vice president, Mister Lehnsherr. But you got the rest of it right.”

“Are you sure the world is ready for a whole country full of mutants, Miss Huxley?” Erik asks her, leaning back against the wall of his cell.

“Weren’t you, when you were hiding in Genosha, trying to rebuild it?” Huxley asks rhetorically. “You did a nice job, by the way.”

“Vice president, eh?” Erik muses. It’s a blow to his ego to think he’ll serve under someone else. Of course, that could change depending on who that someone is.

“Obviously, this isn’t like throwing up a web site on the Internet – there’s going to be a lot more to this than saying, ‘Genosha is a country now, here are the laws, here are the leaders’,” Huxley tells him. “It’s going to be a long process… first finishing the construction of the capital you started on, finding qualified individuals to fill the branches of government and law enforcement… and of course you’ll probably need more citizens than just the rogue factions of mutates scattered over the island that are keeping the Genoshan black market alive and kicking.”

“I am well aware of what needs to be done,” Erik replies. “And I am more than up to the task.”

“I thought so,” Huxley says, smiling once more. “And since you’ve been so cooperative with us these past weeks, and we haven’t found any evidence of terrorist activity in Genosha, the council overseeing your interrogation is willing to give you a chance. A fresh start, an opportunity to make up for your past crimes. You’ll be constantly under our surveillance, of course.”

Erik glares at the woman for a moment; he wonders if she’s trying to make him lose his temper, to give the UN an excuse to revoke these privelages they’re prepared to bestow upon him? Whatever the case, he won’t do any such thing. He’s going to make this work if it kills him.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Erik says.

“Excellent,” Huxley replies. “In that case, we have our first order of business to discuss. That question I’m sure is burning a hole in your head right now… if you’re going to bevice president, then what about the top spot?”

“Yes, I must admit I’m curious,” Erik tells her.

Huxley hands Erik a folder and while he opens it and reviews the contents, she continues, “We couldn’t think of anyone more perfect for the job, honestly. Our question is, what do you think?”

After studying the content of the folder for a moment longer, Erik closes it and looks back at Huxley. “Honestly? I’m not sure she’ll want the job. But if so… I think she’ll do fine.”

Huxley smiles yet again. “Great, I’ll let them know, and we’ll put the call in,” she tells Erik. “I’ll let you go back to your reading, though I’d suggest some sleep. The council wants to meet with you in a few hours.”

“I’ll take that under advisement,” Erik says as Huxley nods at him, then exits his cell. He lets out a sigh, and sits back down on the bed. As he returns to reading his paper, he says, “Well Charles, it looks like things are going to work out after all…”

Charles Xavier sets the pen down on the desk inside what was once his office, and lets out a soft sigh. This time it’s proving much too difficult to say goodbye. Perhaps because of where he’s going? He’s surprised he managed to finish the letter.

Yet, he knows this is what he must do. It’s the only way he knows of to stop himself from messing things up yet again. He refuses to destroy what his former students now have.

Charles opens a small compartment embedded in one of the arms of his hoverchair and takes out a small, shiny object. He takes a moment to look around the dark room he’s inside of, and listens for any noises. He doesn’t hear or sense anyone coming; it’s so late at night, everyone is likely asleep.

Charles holds the small revolver in his hand and studies it for a moment. Cassandra already shot him with it once, and oddly enough there’s only one bullet left inside the chamber. It’s all he needs, though.

He holds the gun to his temple, closing his eyes and taking a deep, final breath. Any last minute hesitations he has are quashed as his life – including all of his mistakes – flash before his mind’s eye. This is the only way. This is the end.

NEXT ISSUE: Xavier remembered, and the march towards the revamp continues as one X-Man makes a shocking decision!